A Review on the Applications of Ozonation for the Treatment of Real Agro-Industrial Wastewaters

Regarding agro-wastewaters, the strong loads in bio-refractory substances and seasonality reduce the efficiency of biological treatments and ozonation can play an important role, so that this article reviews its application for such streams. Indeed, biodegradability and toxicity removal was assessed for a wide range of agro-effluents such as olive mill, wineries and distilleries, pulp and paper, cork and cheese production. Solid catalysts reveal promising potential, even though literature is still scarce reporting their use to actual streams. Thus, forthcoming research must embrace catalytic ozonation and continuous pilot-scale reactors behavior on the depuration of real agro-wastewaters to ensure future industrial application.